How common is HPV in men?

One 2008 study, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases,
found that over the course of 15 months, more than half of the studied
group of 290 sexually active young men spent at least some time infected
with HPV. This is why it's so important to change the question from
"can men contract HPV?" to "how does the human papillomavirus affect
men?"

Interestingly, it's not that men are getting infected and staying
infected. HPV is probably so common, at least in part, because men are
getting new infections all the time.

The same study discussed above
found that most men who were infected with HPV cleared the virus within
six months of becoming infected — in other words, HPV was no longer
detectable in their bodies. In fact, three quarters of men showed no
trace of the virus after one year, and this was true whether the men
were infected with cancer-causing (oncogenic)
strains or non-oncogenic strains.

This is in contrast to previous
studies, which found that women tend to stay infected with
cancer-causing strains of HPV for longer periods of time. Women have
also been shown to be more susceptible to oncogenic HPV than
non-oncogenic HPV, something that, again, does not appear to be the case
for men.

Even though men are good at kicking the HPV virus out of their
bodies, it does not mean that HPV in men is not a real problem. In
addition to the issue of genital warts, it is important to remember that
men are susceptible to HPV-related cancers, even if they are less
common than cervical cancer in women.

Hopefully, increased awareness of the problem of HPV in men will
eventually lead to the development of a commercial test, and encourage
men to get the HPV vaccine now that it has been approved for their use.

It is possible that such approval may happen sooner rather than later, since results of a new study suggest that the vaccine reduces the amount of symptomatic HPV disease as well as the number and length of infections in men.

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